They need to be won back over, and the way you do that is basically the same way Trump did in the first place: by making them feel seen, supported, and important.
VR continues to make more sense as an arcade-like attraction than as a consumer product.
Except for the part where I would have to wear a headset that 5000 other people have also worn. (And except for the VR sickness that, it turns out, I'm very sensitive to).
“If you want me back, you value me,” Sucher told Insider.
Wow, I know business schools are filled with out of touch simps for the ownership class, but I still wasn't prepared for this line.
Like, what was the message that was sent with the layoff? And how does it colour the interpretation of everything else? What good is being "valued" by the ownership class today when it means absolutely nothing for you tomorrow?
It speaks volumes, really, that she thinks being valued by a business - whose goals are explicitly to siphon wealth that workers create into the hands of owners - is something we should feel good about.
Meanwhile, capitalism not only reliably devolves into dictatorships of the wealthy, but also dictatorships of whichever caste or ethnic group manages to rise to political dominance.
Or do you think the consistent and aggressive disenfranchisement of people of colour is just democracy in action or something?
Honestly, the thing that drives me the most crazy about self checkouts is people using them with full carts. They're perfect if you're just grabbing a few things: Just as fast, if not faster, than the 'N items or fewer' checkouts, and no need to interact with anyone. But if you're showing up with 6 bags worth of groceries, and everything in your cart has a coupon or at-cash discount with it, then you need the cashier anyway, so just GTFO of the way. Having the nanny cashier who's looking after 8 self-checkouts come over every 10 seconds to deal with another one of your discounts, or to let you swap bags because you've already filled the item placement area, slows things down for everybody.
People keep claiming this this, and yet it does little to explain hmthr large number of smaller companies that have no real estate holdings.
Also, it totally overlooks what the actual purpose of money is to the wealthy, namely control. It's not money for money's sake, nor is it control for money's sake, but rather money for control's sake.
Meanwhile, WFH is a big shift in worker autonomy. Many employers have treated employees working from home with extreme suspicion, going so far as to accuse us of theft just because they can't directly watch us sit at a desk. They installed computer input trackers on remote hardware, they got belligerent over the idea that people maybe - just maybe - they were doing laundry or soemthing on company time, and they're nettled over the idea that people were sitting on their couches.
This isn't the behaviour of people concerned about their stock portfolios, or of landlords upset that their renters may not renew their lease in 5 years. These are not rational actors making rational decisions about long term consequences. These are people who have lost their fucking minds over having given up just the slightest, insignificant amount of control over their employees lives and, importantly, having handed it over to those employees.
They'll happily take a productivity hit, a revenue decline, or even a massive loss in institutional knowledge if it means clawing back these miniscule gains in worker power.
And if we're lucky, it'll cost them significantly more control over workers in the long run.
They don't need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.
I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they're the same place.
I don't think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don't think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It's a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It's often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.
I don't think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn't fit the tech.
Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they're different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth's sake.
Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell 'Mastodon' as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you're using invisible. I don't think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it's only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They're like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.
Because this isn't Reddit. It doesn't work like Reddit. It can't try to be "Reddit, but ", because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.
community discoverability, [...], and moderation tools
Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There's a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.
And on top of that, it's also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.
Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.
not being able to group communities together
I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.
Like, it's fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.
Time to go watch Junkball videos all morning.